Ars System Guide: Spring forward and build a new, badass rig

Spring is finally upon us, so it's time for a new System Guide. In this …

The God Box

Motherboard

Tyan S5397 (S5397AG2NRF)

The God Box is traditionally divided between workstation-class über-rigs and gaming-oriented builds that don't need dual sockets. We prefer the former approach, ending up with a system that has few equals in the desktop space. Those with less ambitious expectations or who are pure gamers will probably want to look at NVIDIA-chipset motherboards and single-socket motherboards for quad-core CPU and SLI support.

For most God Box builders, the Intel i5400 (Stoakley) chipset-based boards with a pair of 1333mhz or 1600mhz FSB 45nm quad-core Xeons makes the most sense, offering the most performance available on a proven, reliable, high-performance platform. AMD's quad-core Opterons are expected to arrive in TLB erratum-free form soon but, even with that fix they're still considerably behind Intel's Core 2-based Xeon parts, and will stay there at least until the next major revisions to AMD's Opteron line-up roll out. Intel's staying busy as well, with its new Skulltrail platform expected later this year, as well as next-generation chips with an integrated memory controller. All of this will keep the CPU market very competitive in 2008.

For a more gaming-oriented God Box with a single socket setup and SLI, the recent release of NVIDIA's new nForce 790i chipset gives users a brand-new, very competitive chipset, used by boards such as the eVGA 132-CK-NF79-A1. Single-socket AMD builders who want Crossfire will probably want to look at the the MSI K9A2 Platnium for their rigs, or the Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe for SLI support.

Coupling a bunch of quad-core Xeons with Intel's i5400 (Stoakley) chipset boards and NVIDIA Quadro video cards, a dual-socket God Box sporting eight cores and at least 16GB of memory should make for a formidable system. Dual FSBs, PCIe 2.0, twice as many PCIe lanes as its Bensley predecessor, an improved memory controller... Stoakley-based boards such as the Supermicro X7DWA and Tyan S5396AR look very good. The recently announced Asus DESB-DG might be worth looking at once it gets into the wild, particularly with its PCI-e slot arrangement, which looks like it will fit two double-slot graphics cards and a SAS RAID card

Tyan's new S5397 sports dual LGA771 sockets for Intel Xeons, sixteen DDR2 FB-DIMM slots for up to 128GB of memory, two PCI-e x16 slots, one PCI-e x8 slot, two PCI-X slots, and one PCI slot. Add in six SATA 3.0Gbps ports, onboard gigabit Ethernet, and all kinds of goodies.

Processor

Two Intel Xeon X5460 (Retail)

Intel's 45nm update to their processors has kept them on top in the God Box. Faster clock speeds and bigger caches (6MB per pair of cores rather than 4MB) backed up by faster front side bus (FSB) speeds, plus reduced power consumption means there's lots of things to like. Quad-core, 3.16GHz+, 2x6MB L2 cache, and up to 1600MHz FSB—it all adds up to best-in-class performance for most applications as Intel's Core microarchitecture is very good.

Finding 1600MHz Xeons is still very difficult as of this writing, but they're showing up on vendor price lists, so availability is expected fairly soon. The fastest Xeons we can find without giving up obscene amounts of money at the moment are the X5460's, at 3.16GHz and a 1333MHz FSB. The Xeon X5482 (3.2GHz/1600MHz FSB) and E5472 (3.0GHz/1600MHz FSB) should be wonderful drop-in replacements once the true speed hogs can get their hands on them.

RAM

Four Kingston 4GB (2x2GB) ECC DDR2-800 FB-DIMM kits

With very ambitious desktop builders going to 8GB of memory, any God Box worthy of the name should be running at least 16GB, if not more. 16GB+ is made possible by the return of workstation-class chipsets and motherboards to the God Box. This allows the most complex of datasets to be loaded, or maybe just ridiculous multitasking for egomaniacs.

Serious memory hogs may want to look at using 4GB DIMMs to pack in even more, but we figure 16GB is very reasonable. Putting in eight DIMMs allows us to maximize bandwidth available with the i5400 chipset, too. We shift to DDR2-800 FB-DIMMs in this update for increased memory bandwidth, although it's probably an academic difference at best.

For more gaming-class God Boxes, loading up with 8GB of DDR2-1066 or faster makes more sense, using 2GB DIMMs from Corsair, GeIL, Mushkin, Crucial, or others. High-end gamers who are comfortable overclocking their system to the very limit will find that at high frequencies (1800mhz+), DDR3 begins to show a real performance gain over the fastest DDR2, although running four loaded DIMMs at such high speeds is a serious challenge for most memory controllers.

Video

Two NVIDIA QuadroFX 4600

Getting über-fast 3D out of a workstation-class box is expensive. nVidia's Quadro line and AMD's FireGL line are aimed at workstations, and have correspondingly higher prices for what consumers will see as very similar looking hardware.

It's a high price to pay for SLI without being locked into an NVIDIA chipset but, at least until Intel's new Skulltrail platform arrives, it's what we're left with. At the moment, AMD's high-end cards simply do not compete with NVIDIA, and going for anything less than the Quadro FX4600 (better known as the 8800GTX/8800Ultra for the consumer market) would be an absurd step down for the God Box. The highest-end Quadro FX5600 is also available, but as it's based on the same G80 core, it's not all that much faster-- and its price gives even the God Box a reason to pause.

Keep in mind the flexible nature of the God Box: your personal God Box may not need to do everything, so if you don't need ridiculous 2560x1600 3D performance, you can scale back the video cards pretty easily to a single Geforce 8800 Ultra, Geforce 8800GTS 512MB, or AMD Radeon HD 3870 X2 and save a lot of money. The G92-based 8800GTS 512MB may actually be one of the best values around for God Box builders with much more modest needs.

The PNY Quadro FX4600 has 768MB of GDDR3 memory and a 384-bit memory bus for 57.6GB/sec of bandwidth, 128-bit color precision, plus two dual-link DVI ports. When running independently, up to four monitors can be driven with the two cards in the God Box.

Sound

Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer

Hardware 3D acceleration and sound quality as good as the competition make the Creative X-Fi the recommendation. Creative has dominated the market for some time, although a new 3D sound API integrated into Windows Vista may result in a weakening of Creative's position once game developers sort things out. At the moment, there's no point in sacrificing the best 3D sound available for games, which means staying with the Creative X-fi. Individual builders are encouraged to buy what fits their needs best, but for the gaming features, the X-fi remains the only game in town.

Competing cards such as the Bluegears b-Inspirer and Asus Xonar D2X, based the competing C-media Oxygen HD processor, are excellent in most regards, but the C-media lacks the 3D surround acceleration abilities that can match the X-Fi cards from Creative. The Auzentech X-Fi-based Prelude is the sole third-party card that can match Creative's X-Fi, as it uses the X-Fi chip with Creative's permission. It appears to be a solid card, but we have very limited experience with the X-Fi Prelude and will hold off on recommending it until that changes.

We used to recommend a more professional-level card such as the Terratec Aureon 7.1 FW or the M-Audio Firewire 1814 for additional input/output flexibility and better sound quality, but that recommendation seems to be of limited use for most God Box builders.

Communications

None—on-board

In the God Box, we expect nothing less than gigabit Ethernet, and today's onboard implementations cover this area very well. If more is needed, Intel's Pro/1000MT is an excellent single-port choice.

Wireless solutions such as 802.11n, Bluetooth, and other technologies may have their place in the God Box as well, but they are not yet must-haves.

Cost: n/a

SCSI card(s)

LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS 8208XLP Controller

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) brings benefits such as higher transfer speeds and easier cabling for no additional cost over SCSI. It also brings to light an interesting dilemma: we have not been able to find a current dual Xeon motherboard has a suitable PCI-e x16 slot layout to let us use double-width video cards and a PCI-e SAS RAID card, forcing us to either use the limited onboard SAS, or to go back to an older PCI-X card. Asus has a board that might work, but it hasn't shipped yet.

In the meantime, we go back to the older, PCI-X interface LSI Logic 8208XLP to handle disk controller duties in the God Box. While it offers only modest performance compared to today's cards, it's the best that will work. It offers a PCI-X 64bit/133MHz interface, RAID 0/1/5/10 support, and two SFF-8087 x4 internal connectors.

Should you be building a God Box that can use one of the newest PCI-e SAS RAID controllers, there are some very fast cards on the market. The dual-core Intel IOP348-based Areca ARC-1680 and the shiny new 3ware 9690SA offer blazing performance despite their immaturity. Adaptec's 5805 is even newer than the other two cards, but should also be an excellent choice.

Hard drive(s)

Two Fujitsu MBA3300RC 15K 300GB SAS

Short of the latest flash drives from Mtron, Supertalent, and a handful of others, 15K SAS (Serial-Attached-SCSI) disks are about as fast as it gets. At the moment, SSD's in a size large enough for the God Box are extremelypricey and too small to even act as the boot drive.

Fuijtsu's top of the line MBA3 series hard disks have finally started shipping in volume, with a 300GB capacity, 3.4ms seek time, 16MB buffer, and 3Gbps transfer rate—they are about as fast a mechanical disk as you can buy today. We recommend two in RAID1 for even higher read performance and some additional fault tolerance.

Four Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB (HD103UJ) SATA

We bow to the realization that the God Box needs a couple of terabytes of storage in today's world. Sticking with 10K and 15K SAS drives such as Seagate's Cheetah 15K.5 300GBs, makes sense for those who need the highest performance and reliability from their disk arrays, but most God Box users simply need lots of storage more than they need the ultimate I/O performance provided by 15K or 10K SAS disks.

The 1TB disk market is crowded, with choices from all the major players. Samsung's Spinpoint F1 series is the newest of the entrants, and has proven to be worth the wait with its 333GB/platter design producing the highest performance of all of the currently available 1TB drives. Hitachi's Deskstar A7K1000 is almost as fast despite its older 200GB/platter design, while Seagate's Barracuda ES.2 1TB lags in single-user scenarios and performs much better in high queue depth server roles.

The Samsung Spinpoint F1 crams 1TB and a 32MB cache into a standard 3.5" one-inch disk. Four of them attached to the SAS RAID controller in RAID5 leads to a tidy 3TB of usable storage. While we would prefer the nearline-storage version for RAID use, the regular Spinpoint F1 should be okay for now.

Optical drives

LG GGW-H20L

Blu-ray has won the format war. LG's GGW-H20L is perhaps the nicest of the Blu-ray writers currently on the market, surpassing Sony's BWU-200S. If you have no desire to burn to Blu-ray, save your money and buy a Sony PS3, which is arguably the best Blu-ray player on the market.

This is the God Box, and the ability to read and write to Blu-ray is nice. At up to 50GB/disc currently, it's also vaguely decent for backup, far more useful than DVD-DL's 8.5GB.

The LG GGW-H20L is a 6x Blu-ray burner, 16x DVD+R, 40X CD-R, 4MB cache, and has a SATA interface.

DVD±/CD-RW: Samsung SH-S203B

For most tasks, the much more pedestrian Samsung SH-S203B/S203N DVD-writer is an excellent unit, as are the Pioneer DVR-212D and Lite-On LH-20A1S. The latest Pioneer DVR-215D is also expected to be a solid performer, although we don't have any hands-on experience with it yet. As commodity products, only the most picky really need to be careful about what they buy.

The Samsung SH-S203B (and its brethen, the SH-S203N) is a top pick in most reviews and, having used quite a few DVD writers, we are very pleased with it in the Orbiting HQ. It supports DVD reads and writes up to 20x, CD reads up to 48x, has a 2MB cache as well as a SATA interface.

Other media

No recommendation

How to back up data has always been a problematic question for home users. Disk-to-disk backup, even on external 1TB disks, is affordable but not particularly expandable. The business solution of tapes is either slow and small in capacity, or unbelievably expensive—even for the God Box.

With several terabytes in the God Box, the prospect of backing it up on a regular basis without an autoloader is frightening. LTO3 tapes are one of the more affordable options (see HP's Ultrium 920 tape drive), but they're expensive and rather small for practical backup at just 400GB native per tape. The larger 800GB LTO4 tapes used in the HP Ultrium 1760 that's expected this spring might make it more realistic, but LTO4 is even more costly; even the smaller LTO3 setups are a huge fraction of a typical God Box builder's budget.

Therefore, we skip the recommendation in this update. God Box builders who need serious backup will have to figure it out for themselves.

Cost: n/a

Case

Silverstone TJ10

Let's get this out of the way: we're never perfectly happy with the chassis we pick for the God Box. It's impossible for it to exist, because there are so many different, conflicting goals for a potential God Box. Big disk arrays, even bigger than what we spec, will stretch the capacity of most desktop-sized tower chassis. Lots of disks mean more vibration and more cables, which are hard to fit into a small chassis. Low noise means damped side panels, minimizing direct exposure of fans to the outside world. Dual video cards means heat, which means more airflow, which means more noise... Plus, it needs to look good.

These requirements all end up being contradictory at some point.

For capacity and cooling, server-class chassis often work out but, as a rule, they're generally pretty noisy and not always compelling to enthusiasts. Server-class cube chassis from Chenbro or Mountain Mods are fine examples of what might work. Server-class towers such as the Chenbro SR10769BK recently popped up in the Orbiting HQ, but they often aren't set up for PSUs with bottom-mount fans or extra-wide tower heatsinks.

Those wanting low-noise setups should look at the Antec P182 (which is not extended ATX friendly) and its bigger brother, the P190 (which is). The Coolermaster Cosmos merits some attention as well. In the stealthy unsuspecting black, the Antec Titan also works. Those with more modest needs can look at the other parts of the guide for recommendations, although keep in mind the need for extended ATX motherboard support and five hard drives may not be compatible with the more modest chassis listed there. Not that the God Box is "modest" by any means...

We go with the Silverstone TJ10 in this update, moving away from the venerable Coolermaster Stacker. Low-noise 120mm fans, extended ATX MB support, 4x5.25" and 7x3.5" (6+1 internal/external) drive bays, front-panel audio/Firewire/USB ports, and a pretty decent cooling layout all work in its favor.

Case accessories

No recommendation

Fan controllers, voltage or total system power draw meters, extra front-mount ports, internal flash memory readers, and other goodies are all nice, but we leave them out of the God Box.

Low-noise system fans combined with better chassis design mean that fan controllers such as the Zalman ZM-MFC1 are usually unnecessary. Flash memory readers are abundant and cheap enough that most people who need one probably already have one, sometimes built into their monitors (a la the Dell 2407WFP-HC). They're nice, but no longer mandatory parts of the System Guide.

Cost: n/a

Power supply

PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad

Power requirements have always been important. PCI-Express throws another power connector into the mix for video cards, further complicating things. While continuous power draw never exceeds more than 250W for the vast majority of high-powered gaming rigs, the God Box is quite a bit more demanding than most systems will ever be.

Since it has to handle two high-end video cards, two processors, and five, six, seven, or even more hard drives, the God Box is one of the few configurations loaded enough to justify 600 watts or more. The Enermax Modu82+ 625W is the most quiet unit available in this range, followed closely by the Corsair HX620 and Seasonic S12 Energy+ 650W. Zippy/Emacs, Delta, and NMB have even higher-end offerings, but then we start to leave the realm of workstation power supplies and head rapidly into redundant server-grade units. For the God Box, PCP&C is a safe, high-quality recommendation, with the Silencer 750 Quad and Turbo-Cool 860 in the line-up.

We would like to include a redundant power supply in the God Box, but it would needlessly complicate the recommendation, particularly because not all cases play well with redundant power supplies. Quiet PC users would also find themselves deafened, or at least somewhat offended. Zippy/Emacs N+1 redundant units are very nice, very reliable, and very expensive, should redundant power supplies be a requirement for your personal God Box.

The PCP&C Silencer 750 Quad has better than 80% efficency, quad PCI-e graphics connectors, 15 drive connectors, can deliver up to 60A on the +12v rail, and backs it all up with a 5 year warranty.

APC Smart-UPS 1500VA

Power protection has to come from a true line-interactive UPS—none of the cheaper automatic-voltage-regulation-only stuff in the God Box. We want sine wave output to keep sensitive components happy and enough capacity to handle lots of expansion. You can keep your God Box protected, from the box itself to the monitor to—well, almost everything else attached to the God Box (except a laser printer!) on a UPS this large.

Belkin, TrippLite, Liebert, and others make excellent units as well. TrippLite in particular may be a better value, but for now we will stick with APC to keep the recommendation simple.

Monitor

Two Dell 3007WFP-HC 30" LCDs

LCDs continue to get more affordable, with constant improvements in color gamut, contrast ratio, and response time appearing in every generation of models. Wide-gamut monitors are no longer a rare exception in the market—several makers are now on their 2nd generation or later of wide-gamut displays. With LCDs being so affordable, dual20" or even dual 24" LCDs are no longer the extravagance they once were.

30" displays such as the Apple 30", HP LP3065, and Dell 3008WFP are among the top of the line consumer displays available. God Box builders who don't need the massive screen real estate of 30" monitors and are shopping 24" panels instead will be interested in the Dell 2407WFP-HC, BenQ G2400W, and HP LP2465.

The most color-critical users will be looking at the higher-end Eizo Coloredge CG241W, Eizo CG301W, NEC LCD2490WUXi, NEC LCD2690WUXi, and their competition, as well as a way to calibrate them. Fortunately, only the very most demanding users will expect this sort of color accuracy.

The Dell 3007WFP-HC has a 12ms response time, a 1000:1 contrast ratio, 300cd/m^2 brightness, and a 2560x1600 resolution. Its newer 3008WFP sibling is available, but doesn't offer a huge advantage in the God Box, and may actually be slightly worse for gaming due to higher input lag.

Speakers

Logitech Z-5500 Digital

Recommendations for computer speaker surround sound setups in the Audio/Visual forum have been a bit thin lately, probably because the selection has gotten pretty dismal. Creative's Gigaworks S750 is a former God Box choice that appears to have evaporated from the market, as have Altec Lansing's FX6021 2.1 and the Swan M200MkII 2.0 setup. For 2.0 or 2.1 setups, M-Audio's Studiophile BX8A are excellent choices that actually lean nearer to the Home Theater segment. Axiom Audio's brand new Audiobyte setup is also a potential candidate from a well-known maker of home theater speakers.

If you are spending this much money on a computer, you probably want something more elaborate in the form of a real home theater setup. We do not feel qualified to give such a recommendation here, although our Audio/Visual forum members would be glad to help. Even the best computer speaker setups cannot compare to a modest, good-quality home theater setup.

Mouse

n/a

Included with the keyboard. See below.

Cost: n/a

Keyboard and Mouse

Logitech Cordless MX 5500

We recommend you buy a keyboard that you like—personal preference reigns here.

Logitech's cordless MX 5500 includes the MX Revolution laser mouse in a complete wireless setup and is a very flexible starting point for the God Box. It doesn't get much more high-end than this, aside from maybe the truly excessive Optimus Maximus.

Many prefer conventional 104-key keyboards. Older "click" models from IBM and others, such as Unicomp, are favorites for many, while some of us prefer quiet units such as Dell's old school Quietkey.

For gaming mice, the cordless MX Revolution may not be ideal. The Logitech MX518, Razer Lachesis, and Razer Copperhead are all popular choices for gamers.

Total price: $13,328.26, not including shipping and handling (3/23/2008, no OS)

Recommended operating systems

While a computer is not much good without an operating system, these system recommendations are intended to be hardware-only. But do not despair; we have some OS recommendations specially formulated for the God Box. The release of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista makes us comfortable with recommending Microsoft's newest OS. Interface quirks, driver model changes, and everything else aside, Vista now looks to be a reasonably solid by OS, and our experience with Service Pack 1 leads us to believe that the irritants found by early adopters will be down to a manageable level with SP1. Those opting for 64-bit versions of Vista should also keep in mind that Vista x64 requires signed drivers, which could be an additional headache when dealing with situations where drivers tend to rapidly evolve, such as video cards.

We're also continuing to recommend Windows XP, as it's a proven OS with established driver support and fewer undocumented surprises than Vista. We also recommend Linux, although some may be surprised that we're fairly distro-agnostic here in the Orbiting HQ.

Windows Vista Home Premium

Vista Home Premium adds Aero Glass, Windows Media Center, and a whole host of additional features. Combined with the increasing driver support in Vista, there's less of a need to stick with older versions of Windows XP.

Windows Vista Ultimate

The fully loaded edition of Vista brings Aero Glass, Windows Media Center, Windows Complete PC Backup, Remote Desktop Connection, and a host of features not seen in lesser versions of Vista. Hot Rod users may not need all of these features, but they're nice to have.

Windows 2003 Server Standard x64 Edition

Windows 2003 Server is an excellent OS for those seeking to use the full power of the God Box as a server. A server OS for serious users who need the 64-bit support to take advantage of large amounts of memory and 64-bit instructions. Those looking for ultimate performance may wish to consider that the relative maturity of the drivers for this OS is low compared to more established operating systems. Specifically, immature hardware drivers tend to show lower performance than their more-mature counterparts.

Windows XP Professional x64 Edition

Take advantage of performance improvements with programs that support the 64-bit instructions enabled on the Athlon64, Opteron, Xeon, Pentium 4, and Core 2. When deciding between Windows XP in the (conventional) 32-bit and the newer x64 edition, keep in mind that hardware drivers for the x64 edition are less mature and often, as a result, slower. Fortunately, x64 drivers are fairly mature right now, so this is less of an issue than it was in the past.

We used to recommend Windows XP Professional, but it does not handle more than 3GB of memory very well. Builders of lower-cost boxes such as the Budget Box and Hot Rod may wish to go with 32-bit XP due to superior hardware support and driver performance.